In A Room of One's Own, her suggestive and pleasantly rambling reflection on the subject of women and literature, Virginia Woolf decides, after some speculation on the specificity of women's writing, the woman's sentence, women's experience as a literary subject, etc., that a great literary mind must be androgynous, and that "it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex." No doubt referring to the secondary status of women in the affairs of the world that she has been discussing, she continues, "It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death." It would seem with these words that Woolf couldn't have distanced herself further from what contemporary feminist literary critics have wrought, often in her name. For in feminist criticism, consciousness of sex, or gender, as it is now often called, has become the presiding principle, both in analyzing literature and in the act of literary criticism itself. And as for grievance, opposition to patriarchy and the determination to undermine it remain central tenets both of radical feminism and the criticism it has inspired.

Thus, for some time now in feminist criticism there has been a persistent insistence on a special woman's sensibility or consciousness in literature--putatively and potentially comprising a female tradition, language, and aesthetic, as well as female forms and styles--however poorly supported or realized in practice, however contradictory, or however much contradicted, even by feminists themselves. The irony of feminists who often insist on absolute equality with men also demanding recognition of their specific differences has been noted, as women are sent into combat while sexual harassment and date rape are elevated to national concern. This irony had its literary reflection when feminist criticism decried the omission of women writers from the literary mainstream while also protesting the failure to see them in their separate female tradition. Yet another irony is that feminism often demands sameness where it may not be appropriate--in combat, for example, or in child care--and difference where sameness might seem to apply, as in philosophy, science, and the creation of literature, giving the impression of a general war against everything as it is commonly experienced. Seen in this light, even the strictures against date rape and sexual harassment, whatever the sincerity of the original impulse behind them, begin to look suspicious. As these strictures seem to grow ever more shrill and unreasonable, they also start to reveal themselves as efforts to eliminate sex from everyday experience even while feminist intellectuals are insisting on a gendered "mental" universe that is fully determined and inescapable. The direction for sex in dystopic feminist thought, it might seem, is "out of the bed and into the head."

Even commentators on the left have begun to notice the tyranny of this new brand of thought. "Indeed, the impulse to mediate social experience through [what is now called] identity [factors like sexuality] has become so routine, such a hegemonic part of our experience, that it is difficult to remember that this was not always the case," a writer in Tikkun commented recently, the word "hegemonic" signalling an awareness that we are now operating under a new kind of oppression. The article goes on to assert tantalizingly that there was once an agreed upon common human nature, in this century often buttressed by psychoanalytic theory, which, granted, had its limitations, but which, for example, saw human beings "as bundles of drives and complexes that were universally experienced."

But one of the tactics of the early days of the feminist movement was to horrify us by unearthing examples of great injustice to women in history and barraging us with passages from the great thinkers and writers that revealed gross sexism, or as it was more commonly called then, chauvinism. Then there was consciousness raising in which the ordinary unhappiness attendant upon most lives was given a specifically female political dimension and urgency. These tactics often worked, and the history and condition of women began to be separated out from that of men and began to look like one angry gray sea of oppression and horror, although admittedly it could be hard at times to reconcile oneself to the idea that one's own sturdy, jolly, strong-willed, foreign-born, little grandmother had endured the bitterest of human bondage. But, indeed, if one's own condition as a member of the freest generation of females in the history of humankind could be made to seem onerously deprived, anything is possible, especially when ideology overwhelms common experience. Life is always more varied than theories can suggest, something that literature has always been good at reminding us of, which is one of the reasons it has become a target for feminist revisionism.

But what is really surprising to think of today is that with all the inequality and injustice that can be located and documented in the past, some of it genuine, some of it spurious, an overriding conception of a human nature common to all still somehow persisted. The gendering of the mental universe is something feminists can take credit for all by themselves. Thus, while my aforementioned grandmother would have had no trouble recognizing herself in the designation "man" or "mankind," a group of young female students at a conservative, religiously oriented Eastern college told me recently that they are completely unable to hear those words as my grandmother did, that they must needs hear the words "woman" or "womankind" alongside of them in order to feel themselves included.

A glimpse of the long-forgotten, ungendered past comes through when we look at the surprise expressed by certain writers and critics already active and productive at the time the women's movement began, foolishly coursing through life thinking of themselves as actual human beings, writers and critics, now being made to ponder their roles in the feminist future.

Cynthia Ozick saw the term "woman writer" as purely political because it was not being "used descriptively--as one would say `a lanky brown-haired writer'--but as part of the language of politics....But the language of politics is not writer's language," she warned. "Politics begins with premises; imagination goes in search of them. The political term "woman writer" signals in advance a whole set of premises: that, for instance, there are `male' and `female' states of intellect and feeling, hence of prose; that individuality of condition and temperament do not apply, or at least not much, and that all writing women possess--not by virtue of being writers but by virtue of being women--an instantly perceived common ground; that writers who are women can best nourish other writers who are women....I deny this," says Ozick. "When I write," she continues, "I am free. I am, as a writer, whatever I wish to become. I can think myself into a male, or a female, or a stone, or a raindrop, or a block of wood, or a Tibetan, or the spine of a cactus."

But, as Ozick observed, "More and more, apartness is perceived as the dominant aim, even the chief quality, of feminism. More and more, women are urged to think of themselves in tribal terms, as if anatomy were the same as culture. More and more, artists who are women are made to feel obliged to deliver a `woman's art.'" And sounding Woolf's ominous note, Ozick asserts, "Art formed or even touched by any inflexibility--any topical or social expectation, any extrinsic burden, any axiom or presumption or political nuance, any prior qualification at all--will always make for a debased culture."

Another female voice of reason in the 1970s at the frontier of the feminist advance was a professor of literature teaching in Israel, Minda Rae Amiran, a self-described feminist from the fifties, who felt "compelled to state that I find the present interest in `women's literature' degrading, and the teaching of women's literature in English departments a subversion of women's liberation." In answering "whether `women's literature' is a literary category," Amiran comments, "`women's literature' usually refers to fiction and poetry written by women,...it also may be extended to women's letters, diaries, and autobiographies. This being so, it is easy to locate members of the category, but that is not to say that the category really exists as an object of study. A zoologist easily could locate members of a category, `brown fauna': the question is whether he could learn anything zoological by studying a family composed of brown bears and [brown] moths. Are there any literary qualities present in all works by women and absent from all works by men?" Professor Amiran asks. She can find none.

Professor Amiran is right; trying to classify literature by sex is highly problematic. Efforts to identify the sex of an author from passages from his or her work have uniformly failed. There are sentences of Hemingway that can sound feminine, of George Eliot that can sound masculine. We may be prepared to admit rhetorically that no man could have written Pride and Prejudice and no woman War and Peace, but truly, if we try to define what is specifically masculine or feminine about them, we run into trouble. Are women more interested in dress and domestic life? Yes, perhaps, on the whole, but then there are Willa Cather and Flannery O'Connor, whose literary concerns take them far from these subjects. Are men more interested in war and public events? Perhaps, but then there's Henry James, with his intensity of focus on the minutest of human interactions. Would anyone dare suggest that only female writers can portray convincing females, with Shakespeare, Flaubert, and Tolstoi on the literary scene? There are differences between the sexes, but to the extent that writers are bound by them, their work sinks below the level of literature. The most feminine of writing is perhaps the romance novel, and the most masculine, the Mike Hammer series. The greater the writer, the greater the capacity to transcend particularities.

The same can be true of literary characters. Looking at female characters in isolation led many feminists to false conclusions: "Have women problems of self-definition?" Professor Amiran asks. "So do almost all the heroes of the "Bildungsroman". Must women choose between marriage and a career? So must Antony....Are many women blighted by not being free to choose the man they love? So are many men forced to abjure their chosen mates, like Richard Feverel, or forced into unwanted marriage, like the son in The Way of All Flesh....The `double standard' affects Hardy's Tess no less severely than it does Wharton's Archer."

It is sometimes suggested that women characters are special carriers of the social order in the literary universe. True a lot of the time, but sometimes they serve as peculiar disrupters of the social order, as in the great German film, Pandora's Box. Furthermore, we are used to hearing the conservative lament, true enough as far as it goes, that young women are less and less willing to perform their time honored task of domesticating young men. But the peculiar distortions of our time have prevented us from seeing the important role men can play in centering and stabilizing women--The Taming of the Shrew being an extreme comic variant of this scenario. Even the more reasonable version of it exemplified in the courtship of Mr. Knightly and Emma, a good example of what I mean, is in disrepute in the feminist inflected world of today. Conversely, Mrs. Bennet can be seen as a woman given over to frivolity partly because of her husband's lack of interest in her character.

At any rate, all the wit and wisdom of such women as Cynthia Ozick and Minda Rae Amiran could not stop the relentlessly radicalizing tides, and as the years progressed, fewer and fewer voices of protest could be heard that would challenge the premises of the feminist enterprise (and there were few enough to begin with--see endnote). Courses in "women writers" proliferate and attempts by feminists to define a specific female literary sensibility continue. These critics keep overturning and contradicting themselves but they won't let go even when driven by the ironic logic of their enterprise into recapitulating the whole range of female stereotypes that feminism was supposedly sent to overturn--interior space, emotionalism, illogic, circularity, etc.--in some cases going far beyond what the most dyed in the cashmere sexist chauvinist could ever have imagined even in his most testosterone driven dreams.

According to Peter Shaw's account, the "most radical feminist critics have argued that women writers and readers differ from men not only in that they prefer to be less logical, but also because they are intrinsically less coherent intellectually." Furthermore, many feminist critics have developed a thoroughgoing "biologism"--"the proposition that women's biological makeup dictates how they think, read, and write." "Women's chemical and physical makeup, explains Luce Iragaray, a prominent French theorist, renders them `temperamental, incomprehensible, perturbed, capricious.' For these reasons, the French critic Julie Kristeva asserts, women writers function primarily as `hysterics,' and their prose should be traced to `the predominance in them of drives related to anality and childbirth.'"

"Drawing on" Jacques Lacan's "characterization of the phallus as the `primary signifier,'" Shaw continues, "French criticism does not hesitate, either, to ask the logical question (in the words of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar): `If the pen is a metaphorical penis, from what organ can females generate texts?' The reply--that it must be the female genitalia--appears evident enough and has been widely accepted. (Helene Cixous, it is true, employs an alternate `Kleinian analysis of the mother's nipple as a pre-Oedipal penis image,' but she has been faulted for a superficial willingness to `happily integrate both penis and nipple.') Still, once the female genitalia are agreed upon, just which part should be `privileged'? At this point in the argument, the escalation of terms continues in a most baroque fashion," Shaw warns, and I apologize in advance to the assault on modesty, but this is no country for old men.

"Luce Iragaray champions the vulva," Shaw reports impassively. "In her theoretical system the unique experience of pleasure derived from the labia, `two lips which embrace each other continuously,' is the basis of the self-indulgent, illogical thinking and writing--jouissance--that should and will become characteristic of women. [Male feminist] K. K. Ruthven," Shaw continues, "has pointed out that uncircumcised men can be said to experience in their foreskins comparable self-stimulation to the two lips of the vulva, but this theoretical objection has apparently not yet been dealt with. ... Naomi Schor holds that Iragaray tends `to valorize the vagina at the expense of the clitoris'--an evidently more weighty objection....Schor calls on feminist critics to correct the shortcomings of Iragaray's approach by developing a `clitoral hermeneutics.' But here radical politics proves to be at odds with itself. For even before such a project can be completed, a political objection has already been raised by other feminists--namely that jouissance, whether it be clitorally or labially derived, excludes Third World Women who have undergone clitoridectomies."

And all of this biologism persists side by side in feminism with the insistence that gender is entirely a social construct. Such nonsense can make women blush for their womanhood for more reasons than one. I'm reminded of the remark of a friend, whose accomplished mother and wife had led him to believe firmly that women can certainly do first rate intellectual work, until he began to read the feminists.

A definite and readily recognizable female point of view does appear in one kind of writing by women, in sentimental novels, of this century and centuries past, and despite one's thought that the point of view is anything but feminist, and the novels anything but literature, they have proved to be of interest to our undaunted feminist critics. Here too there is a cold logic operating. Just as the emphasis on gender as an across the board intellectual principle has driven feminist critics to the crudest biological reductivism, so has it driven them to the crudest emotional reductivism. Ann Douglas's study of the nineteenth century American sentimentalists, The Feminization of American Culture, also from the seventies, dismissed these novels as crude and meretricious, creating a cult of sentimental femininity that caricatured the real thing and that cheapened the terms of cultural life. She has since partly recanted her negative assessment of these works in deference to feminist politics but it still holds--before feminism no one would have dreamed of taking these books seriously as literature but feminists have now reread them as, for example, coded revolutionary documents, in which female domestic power becomes dominant. But this particular feminist approach can have a harmful effect roughly analogous to what Gertrude Himmelfarb has described as the effect of the new social history. A kind of up-from-below view of women's behavior that emphasizes the coded, the furtive, the subversive, the domestic--not as a metaphor for larger things but in itself--takes women out of the running for a free and open and vigorous moral life, written about in great literature, including literature by women, even if, as is the case with many novels, there is a failure to achieve it. This feminist approach emphasizes the least determined, the least volitional of female attributes, concentrating instead, for example, on a kind of unthinking, sentimental, salvific femininity. It is also possible that the work of Carol Gilligan and her ideas of a separate female morality, which often turn out to be elevating subjectivity and self-justification to moral principles, may be seen as a psychological handmaiden of the feminist glorification of the sentimentalists.

Some critics are beginning to cede the point--no really feminine point of view or perspective has emerged, but a feminist aesthetic has, more feminist than aesthetic, in other words, political. Nancy K. Miller has spoken of "a reading that consciously recreates the object it describes." Even more bluntly, Penny Boumelha declares, "I want to propose that a feminist reading of any text...is an appropriation of the work for feminism rather than a revelation of any pre-existing belief or intention of the author. A feminist reading is a reading made for ourselves by the needs and interests of contemporary feminism." And even more bluntly than that, Mary Jacobus asserts of the idea of a feminine consciousness in literature, "We need it, so we invent it." And any doubt that feminist criticism is fully political and committed to a specific, a priori, political agenda is readily and openly dispelled by the critics themselves: "The feminist reader is enlisted in the process of changing the gender relations which prevail in our society," asserts one critic, "and she regards the practice of reading as one of the sites in the struggle for change." And in an anthology of gender criticism, the editor cautions that "talking about gender without a commitment to dismantling sexism, racism, and homophobia, can degenerate into nothing more than a talk show," but handled properly "could also move us a step further towards `post-patriarchy.'"

Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that what has emerged as feminist criticism digs itself deeper and deeper into its trenches, is how much at odds with the sensibility of good writers, even, or especially, good women writers, feminists are. If there is a true woman's perspective in literature, I believe it can be located 180 degrees from contemporary feminism. I'd like to consider a few examples of this and then use them as a springboard to some final words on the possibilities of a woman's literary perspective.

A fine collection of literary critical essays about women writers and female characters by Elizabeth Hardwick entitled Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature, appeared fairly early in the feminist movement, in 1974. Even though it takes us back quite a ways, I consider the feminist reception to this book a key factor in understanding the nature of contemporary feminist criticism and a harbinger of what would be the fate of any woman who attempted a more traditional or conservative feminism. If feminist criticism had been able to embrace what Hardwick does in this book it would have forged for itself a very different character from what it has today. But despite feminist claims to be inclusive, its "range of opinion," as Shaw remarks, "extends no further than the distance from `liberal' to `radical' to `socialist'--a description recalling the socially conscious butler in the Noel Coward play whose mistress proudly remarks that he reads everything `from the New Statesman to the Daily Worker.'" In feminist criticism, one of the purportedly "looser" definitions of feminist fiction, for example, begins with the premise, "Feminist fiction is fiction that does not admire patriarchy or accept its ideology." The idea that patriarchy may be something other than the institutionalization of female inferiority is not considered. An example of a difference of opinion for feminists would be something along these lines: "Do men in the main oppress women consciously or unconsciously?" The idea of oppression is an unexamined given and there is no other way to consider the relationship between the sexes.

And we can rest assured that nothing much has changed since the feminist reception of Hardwick's book. One feminist tactic in the face of criticism is to dismiss it roundly but then to hasten to insist that in any event the feminist critical enterprise has moved so far beyond whatever shortcomings may be cited in the work at hand as to make any criticism of it superfluous, and in fact to render culpable the critic who has not attended to the latest feminist developments, which of course in actuality always turn out to replicate the old in the major points. In fact, the substance of the debate over Hardwick has been repeated in a few other instances (for example, the exchange between Richard Levin and the feminist critics of Shakespeare), and in all of them the same battle lines appear between feminism and any true appreciation of literature.

It is true that Hardwick's book does operate within the deliberately-assumed feminist stricture of being about women writers and female characters, but she has produced something of merit (and one does not have to agree with all of her interpretations to see it), and pretty much the only work of value to have emerged from the entire feminist movement. She no doubt intended that this collection be an effort at feminist literary criticism, and indeed, Susan Sontag called it the "most remarkable of recent contributions to the feminist imagination of history." (Despite her trendiness, Sontag can be a good critic; she often knows where things are, although she sometimes mislays them, and at one point she had to fight her own battle as a "woman critic" against Adrienne Rich in order not to have to make a reductive feminist analysis in a discussion of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.) Ironically, however, a number of prominent feminists repudiated Seduction and Betrayal altogether, devoting long articles and considerable energy to denouncing it as reactionary, anti-feminist, and even blatantly sexist. They termed it an exercise in nostalgia for the woman as victim and assailed it as a celebration of female masochism (so you know it must be good). To my knowledge, no feminist ever formally defended Hardwick from these attacks and so they stand on the record, extremely revelatory of the nature of feminist thought.

Hardwick begins from a premise antithetical to the feminist/ideological approach to literary criticism--she believes that literature is conservative in the most basic, non-political-activist sense, i.e., that it is traditional. A good example is the title essay from the collection, "Seduction and Betrayal," a meditation on the form of the old seduction plot in such novels as The Scarlet Letter, An American Tragedy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and The Mill on the Floss. The essay is a delineation of the possibilities for self-realization for the female characters as these are set within the structure and limitations of the form itself. Hardwick allows that the novel, "deterministic, bourgeois in spirit," does not seek to "violate the laws of social survival" or to "impose standards of revolutionary skepticism about the nature of all of society's arrangements." The novel understands that society mediates (and sometimes mitigates) the inevitable contingenciesof the human condition, recognized as inevitable by all but the utopian thought of which feminism is a variant.

Having said this much, however, Hardwick distinguishes between the heroism and "spiritual goodness" that characterizes the behavior of some betrayed women characters, "the betrayed heroine," as she calls them (Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, for example), and the weakness, vanity and irresolution of others, "the merely betrayed woman," as Hardwick puts it (Hetty Sorrel in The Mill on the Floss, for example). Indeed, in the strength of character a woman shows in response to sexual betrayal, she can easily surpass the male characters of the novel, for whose part in the seduction plot, at least, both nature and culture often exact a lesser price. As the lessons of life grow sterner, the heroine grows in inner light--in wisdom, grace, and humility. "When love goes wrong," Hardwick remarks, "the survival of the spirit appears to stand upon endurance, independence, tolerance, solitary grief." So far from rebelling against existing arrangements, as feminists would prefer, Hardwick's heroine finds herself "under the command of necessity, consequence, natural order," and her "bending to these commands" marks her as "a superior being."

But one feminist critic mocked Hardwick's distinction between the "betrayed heroine" and the "merely betrayed woman," calling them, respectively, "paper ladies" and "spiritual D-students." This critic admits that Hardwick's analysis is "the way such novels operate," and that Hardwick's readings are "acute," but clearly she is angry with Hardwick for not having politicized the suffering of her seduced heroines by expressing "proper rage at the organization of bourgeois life": "Doubtless, women did, still do, console themselves with the notion that silent suffering enriches them," says this critic, "that stoicism in the face of cruelty or cowardice makes them better people. It is the sort of myth all victims embrace to attain imaginary emancipation, interior breathing space. And it is a myth that seduces outsiders into easy sentiment, cheap thrills. Tolstoy's peasants and Faulkner's blacks have soul; they plump the universal spiritual larder. Transcendent abandoned ladies or transcendent downtrodden serfs--they are luxuries of the imagination. Real serfs, of either sex and any period, can be counted on to grow rich in bitterness, fear, duplicity and despair."

Since Hardwick has portrayed a heroine who not only can endure but triumph in the face of suffering, feminist critics have accused her of exalting "female masochism." The incapacity to distinguish the grace of genuine endurance in the face of suffering from sheer masochism is among feminism's weakest points since it mocks the value of facing life's purifying trials and also makes impossible the tragic view of the human condition out of which much great literature arises, advancing instead a model of protest and revolution against all existing arrangements.

Incapable of distinguishing between masochism and heroism, the feminists also seem incapable of distinguishing literary analysis from actual life. As morally suggestive as her analysis is, Hardwick isn't really prescribing personal conduct. She is articulating the structure of a certain type of novel and noting the generative possibilities within its form, a "form" as she describes it, "not entirely commensurate with the heedlessness and rages of life." This is not to suggest, of course, that literature and life are not connected; they are. But they are not connected in the direct, literal and simplistic way that feminists sometimes assume.

For example, feminists often decry the fact that so many novels about women end in marriage or death because they want to see more options realized for women in literature, and in life. This is silly. No one is telling the female reader to marry or to die. These two are highly resonant and symbolic endings for works of fiction. Marriage, for example, can signify wholeness, the resolution of opposites, the continuity of the social order, the birth of a new generation, the happy placement of the individual in society, etc., etc. All of this is not available in an ending in which the heroine claws her way to becoming chairman of the board (an ending more appropriate for a TV mini-series). Death too, as grim as it can seem as the fate of so many literary heroines, like Anna and Emma, has the sense of conveying the utter seriousness of life, that the stakes under which the most ordinary of existences is lived are high, that one's choices are meaningful, or had better be. Now with all our superficial, no-fault options, life has less meaning, as does the literature we produce. Fiction influenced by feminism, for example, like that of Alice Walker, or Marge Piercy, or Grace Paley, often forsakes form and resonance to depict PC choices like a lesbian union, or a menage trois, or radiant single motherhood. Not that such things can't be depicted in fiction but they need more context than these writers can provide with their feminist perspective.

Often feminism repudiates morality altogether in favor of politics. Take another feminist's readings of Ibsen, for example, which arise in her extended critique of Hardwick's book, particularly of Hardwick's own views of the playwright's female protagonists. In Rosmersholm, for example, Rebecca, the main character, is an idealist who becomes involved with a married man and helps to drive his wife to suicide in order to free him to pursue his "new ideas"; she then suffers remorse. The critic calls Rebecca's remorse a lesson in "social control" and mourns that "radical idealists can be destroyed by guilt about their family and sex lives." Sighs the feminist critic, "The conscience is conservative." Similarly, this critic tells us that regarding another Ibsen play, Hedda Gabler, Hardwick cannot see that Hedda is "not fully responsible for the evil she causes." Why? Because "Social conditions and family life have destroyed the possibility of freedom." Furthermore, Hedda has no "useful and interesting work" to do. What a contrast this sociological excuse-making presents to Hardwick's search for heroism and moral choice within restricted, even abusive, circumstances.

Failing or refusing to see the moral issue at all, yet another critic psychoanalyzes Hardwick herself. Hardwick's problem, says this critic, with impeccable feminist insight, is that she "cannot stop seeing women except in relation to the men in whom primary experience is trapped, and from whom there radiates that proximity to the world and self every sentient being craves expressive contact with." But feminist insight stops poorly short of truth, and here we can assume that we have run into one of feminism's blind spots again. It is not that Hardwick hasn't shown women achieving "proximity to the world," it is that the "proximity" she has shown, achieved through suffering, acceptance, and humility, is not something feminists would touch with a ten foot pole.

This critic's special outrage is directed at Hardwick's esthetic judgments, however, which for a feminist must be properly politicized to be acceptable. That is, a woman's writing must somehow be seen in view of her femininity. After all, in one of her Seduction and Betrayal essays, Hardwick broke one of the cardinal rules of feminist esthetics when she said that the struggle to be an artist is pretty much the same for both men and women. And with respect to Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle, and Sylvia Plath, Hardwick insists on analyzing and criticizing their writing rather than explaining it by the fact of their often embattled femininity.

The real substance of feminist anger against Hardwick is that she has transgressed the feminist analysis of the female condition by emphasizing individual responsibility in the face of difficult circumstances rather than blaming outside forces, and by placing ultimate significance upon qualities like moral insight and spiritual strength rather than on the more material kinds of power and identity favored by feminists.

My next examples will be much briefer. A similar analysis can be made of the slew of intense, angry feminist criticisms of the great novelist, George Eliot, whom feminists have accused of "living the revolution," but not writing about it. "Feminist critics are angry with George Eliot because she did not permit Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch to do what George Eliot did in real life," comments Zelda Austen, another sane voice from the seventies, "translate, publish articles, edit a periodical, refuse to marry until she was middle-aged, live an independent existence as a spinster, and finally live openly with a man whom she could not marry." But the great Victorian writers, says Austen, both male and female, wanted to speak for all humanity and not just for themselves or exceptional people like themselves. Likewise, Eliot's focus in her novels is not on the feminist ideal of breaking with conventions to achieve a radical individual independence but on a vision of community that harmonizes individual wants into the larger good. (As James Tuttleton has demonstrated, similar or related feminist misreadings have been made of other women writers of essentially conservative temperament like Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin.)

Another example of feminist myopia concerns two different literary responses to the case of Martin Guerre, a prosperous young sixteenth century Basque peasant who left his wife and young son suddenly and without explanation one day. After a period of years, an impostor arrived in the village claiming to be Martin, and was eventually accepted by all, including Martin's wife, Bertrande. After a time, a suit was brought by Bertrande against the impostor, and during the trial, Martin himself appeared at last and reproached his wife for accepting a stranger into her bed. The historical evidence apparently indicates some ambiguity in Bertrande: that she probably brought the suit because of family pressure but that she had indeed been willing to accept the stranger, who turned out to be an agreeable mate, who fathered her second child, and who was in any event obviously a lot better than a nonexistent, long-absent husband.

When the writer Janet Lewis wrote her short spare bittersweet novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre, in 1947, she did not have access to all the historical information (especially about the possibility of Bertrande's being forced to file the suit), and has since remarked that she would have written it differently if she had known the facts. Historian Natalie Zemon Davis did have access to far more historical information and in 1983 used it to create an at least partly imaginative reading of the case, The Return of Martin Guerre. I call it a literary response because it certainly isn't strictly historical and appears to be a work of the new history, one that grew, as Davis describes it, "out of an historian's adventure with a different way of telling about the past," including "new ways to think about the connections between the `general trends' of historians and the living experience of the people." But interestingly, although Davis had more of the facts, her recreation may be less true in a literary sense than Lewis's version. Lewis's rendering of Bertrande's inner life is more intense, and the interest in loyalty, propriety, the stability and legitimacy of her household, etc., that Lewis grants her may be truer in a literary sense (and even in the larger historical sense) than the quasi-feminism of Davis, which may be unduly romantic and individualistic, which provides little overarching structure beyond Bertrande's self-interest, and which works against satisfactory closure and any tragic understanding of the young wife's situation, suggesting instead someone who just gambled and lost.

Much the same kind of insight might apply to the critic Diana Trilling's Mrs. Harris, 1981, a full-length consideration of another real life court case, the one concerning the murder of Scarsdale Diet Doctor Herman Tarnower by his long-time lover, Jean Harris, the well bred headmistress of an exclusive girls' boarding school, after he coldly dropped her for a younger woman. Although this is a non-fiction treatment, Mrs. Trilling's account is so vivid that it suggests comparison with some of the classic novels about seduction and betrayal, and Mrs. Trilling herself thinks of Tolstoy's Anna and Flaubert's Emma, although admittedly the parallels are not exact.

After a rich and sympathetic consideration of all aspects of the case, Mrs. Trilling ponders Mrs. Harris's contention that she was a "female victim." Giving full weight and much credence to the now legendary "feminine mystique" analysis made by Betty Friedan in the sixties that launched modern feminism with its diagnosis of the supposed frustration, insecurity, and lack of fulfillment and identity in women of Mrs. Harris's generation, Mrs. Trilling will not excuse her on this score, but sees her as ultimately responsible for her fate. Mrs. Trilling entertains the language of victimhood somewhat but qualifies it significantly: "Was she a female victim, as she thinks? Yes, I guess she was, in the limited sense of having yielded her own standards in return for advantages that could be given her by a sex more privileged than her own. But, more personally, she was driven by her inner need for degradation, and, more generally, she was a cultural victim. She'd been seduced by our present-day culture into believing that a free sexuality is anyone's for the taking, that one can throw over one's moral rearing without emotional consequences." If Mrs. Harris was a victim, Mrs. Trilling suggests, then it was perhaps a victimhood in which she collaborated.

Furthermore, with the embarrassing reading in court of a letter that had been written by Mrs. Harris to Tarnower, full of "cringing appeals" for his love and harsh, "gutter" assaults upon the new mistress, Mrs. Harris emerged for Mrs. Trilling as someone who had "betrayed both her class and her education," and of course, herself, by continuing to make self-abasing demands on Tarnower's love long after he was through with her. After the writing and the reading of that letter, says Mrs. Trilling, the only thing for Mrs. Harris to do would have been to weep, in shame, not in self-pity. Even as she renders these difficult judgments, however, Mrs. Trilling makes us feel for the fullness of Mrs. Harris's humanity and the terrible humiliation of the public exposure she endured for a man Mrs. Trilling feels had not been worth it. Mrs. Trilling's judgements sorrowfully remind one of Hardwick's harsh distinction between the "betrayed heroine" and "the merely betrayed woman," and here I might be guilty of too simple a connection between literature and life, but it seems to fit so well here: "The betrayed heroine," Hardwick writes, "unlike the merely betrayed woman, is never under the illusion that love and sex confers rights upon human beings. She may, of course, begin with the hope, and romance would scarcely be possible otherwise; however, the truth hits her sharply, like vision or revelation when the time comes. Affections are not things and persons can never become possessions, matters of ownership. The desolate soul knows this immediately, and only the trivial pretend that it can be otherwise."

I once called feminist criticism a barbarism; I was thinking of its tendency to employ intellectual terror and intimidation, rather than logic and reason; to wield accusations of sexism, chauvinism, patriarchalism, white maleism, etc., instead of persuasive argument. But it may also be barbaric in the way that it tears down the accumulated wisdom of generations (including "feminine" wisdom, for example, the perception of stable and socially enforced marriage not as a trap for women, but as a necessary balance to offset their peculiar sexual liabilities), and in the way that it assaults all that makes a literary imagination possible: the aesthetic sense, the moral sense, and the tragic sense.

To return briefly to the idea of a woman's perspective in literature, it may seem tempting once we have pried off the feminist distortions to feel we now have a truer sense of it. An appreciation of both the peculiar strengths and vulnerabilities of womanhood, coupled with an insistence on women's capacity to travel their particular route toward participation in the universal moral life of mankind, seems to mark the view of many fine women writers and critics. But as soon as we've said that much, we realize of course that it does of many fine men writers too. Using the particulars of male and female experience (and of course other types of experiences as well) to speak to the larger human condition is surely an essential literary act. This is perhaps what Virginia Woolf meant by literary "androgyny"--the capacity of good writers of both sexes to operate with both male and female tracks running at once--"masculine" and "feminine" not being peculiar to each sex but representative of different qualities both sexes possess, and "masculine" and "feminine" experience wielded not only particularly but as larger metaphors for different aspects of the universal human condition. Or, as Cynthia Ozick put it even more broadly, "There is a human component to literature that does not separate writers by sex, but that--on the contrary--engenders sympathies from sex to sex, from condition to condition, from experience to experience, from like to like, and from unlike to unlike. Literature universalizes. Without disparaging particularity or identity, it universalizes, it does not divide." Literature, as William Stafford has commented, is one of the great free human activities, and closely and fairly and generously read, it leads us inevitably to a sense of a shared vision of a common human nature.

Endnote

One voice was that of Italian writer Elsa Morante who declared in an interview with Mary Gordon in 1990 that "A writer is a writer. You care about writing. It isn't men or women. I find these feminists very annoying, putting together these anthologies of women writers. As if there were a difference. You sit down, you write, you are not a woman, or an Italian. You are a writer."

Ozick denounced the Great Multiple Lie that assumed a psychology and an emotional temper peculiar to women; assumed a prose or verse style endemic in, and characteristic of, women; assumed a set of preoccupations appropriate, by nature to female poets and novelists--e.g., female friendship, female madness, motherhood, love and romance, domestic conflict, duty, religiosity, etc.; assumed a natural social community grounded in biology and reproductive characteristics rather than in intellect or temperament or derivation or societal experience; took for granted the difference (from "male" writing of "women's" poetry and "women's" novels by assuming a "woman's" separate sensibility); posited for intellect and imagination a purely sexual base. It assumed the writer's gender inherently circumscribed and defined and directed the writer's subject matter, perspective, and aspiration." "For writers who are women, the `new truth' of self-regard, of biologically based self-confinement, is the Great Multiple Lie freshly got up in drag."

Carol Iannone is a professor in the Gallatin Division of New York University.